InfoImagination wants to state unequivocally that we support the young men and women who bravely serve this nation - whether they be our community "first responders," i.e., fire, medical or police officers, as well our military personnel who give so generously and courageously to this nation. They risk their lives without "questioning why." Yet it is our job, as individual Americans, to question the politicians who lead us down this path into war.

We are not pacifists, yet we stand unifed in our belief that human reason, not rifles and gunships, represent the supreme weapon in the battle to further a better world around us. For those of you unclear about the consequences of Bush's approach, we ask you to read the enclosed articles.

Hail of Cluster Bombs Leaves a Trail of Death
Robert Fisk, The Independent

BABYLON, 3 April 2003 - The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hilla teaching hospital are proof that something illegal - something quite outside the Geneva Conventions - occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.

The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the ten patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say - and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows - that they are right.

Were they American or British aircraft which showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hilla hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.

Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30 on Sunday morning, when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-gray color. Muhammad Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver colored. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded."

Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them - perhaps the metal "butterfly" which contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and which springs open to release them in showers above the ground. Some died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hilla hospital.

The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night - the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages - and of these doctors say about 80 percent were civilians.

Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field - as they were along the highway north to Baghdad yesterday? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages - even if aimed at military targets - thus crosses the boundaries of international law.

So it was that 27-year-old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbasi was hit in the legs and 48-year-old Samira Abul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said that the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. Œ'It is like a grenade and they came into the houses," he said. "Some stayed on the land, others exploded."

Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself, and wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't realize that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding.

Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters in a pool of blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.

The Iraqi authorities, of course, were all too ready to allow us journalists access to these patients. But there was no way these children and often uneducated parents could manufacture their stories of tragedy and pain. Nor could the Iraqis have faked the scene in Nadr village where the remains of the tiny bomblets littered the ground beside the scorch marks of the explosions, and where could be found the remains of the tiny parachutes upon which the bomb clusters float to the ground once their containers have broken open. A crew from Sky Television even managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with them, the wicked little metal balls that are intended to puncture the human body still locked into their frame like cough sweets in a metal sheath. They were of a black color which glinted silver when held against the light.

So were the aircraft that dropped these terrible weapons American or British? The deputy administrator of the Hilla hospital and one of his doctors told a confused tale of military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would disgorge Special Forces troops on the road to Karbala; one of their operations - if the hospital personnel are to be believed - went spectacularly wrong one night when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly afterward, the cluster bomb raids began, although the villages that were targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hilla to the abortive American attack.

One thing was clear: that there is no "front line" in the fighting around Babylon, that US forces strike into the land around the Tigris River by air and then withdraw and that Iraqi forces do much the same in the other direction. Only the Americans and British, of course, have air superiority - indeed there is no evidence that a single Iraqi aircraft has taken off since the start of the Anglo-American invasion - so even the US and British officers back at their Qatar command headquarters can hardly claim the cluster bombs were dropped by Iraq.

The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday when 11 civilians were killed - two of them women and three of them children - in a village called Hindiyeh. A man sent to collect the corpses reported to the hospital that the only living thing he found in the area of the bodies was a hen. Iraqi bomb disposal officers were ordered into the villages yesterday afternoon to clear the unexploded ordnance.

Needless to say, it is not the first time that cluster bombs have been used against civilians. During Israel's 1982 siege of West Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for the US Navy across several areas of the city, especially in the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds identical to those I saw in Hilla on Tuesday. Angry at the misuse of their weapons, which are designed for use against exclusively military targets, the Reagan administration withheld a shipment of fighter bombers for Israel - then relented a few weeks later and sent the aircraft anyway.

Cluster Bombs Liberate Iraqi Children
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

AMMAN - The horror. The horror. And unlike Apocalypse Now, there are real, not fictional images to prove it. But they won't be seen in Western homes. The new heart of darkness has emerged in the turbulent history of Mesopotamia via the Hilla massacre. After uninterrupted, furious American bombing on Monday night and Tuesday morning, as of Wednesday night there were at least 61 dead Iraqi civilians and more than 450 seriously injured in the region of Hilla, 80 kilometers south of Baghdad. Most are children: 60 percent of Iraq's population of roughly 24 million are children.

Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Iraq, describes what happened in Hilla as "a horror, dozens of severed bodies and scattered limbs". Initially, Murtada Abbas, the director of Hilla hospital, was questioned about the bombing only by Iraqi journalists - and only Arab cameramen working for Reuters and Associated Press were allowed on site. What they filmed is horror itself - the first images shot by Western news agencies of what is also happening on the Iraqi frontlines: babies cut in half, amputated limbs, kids with their faces a web of deep cuts caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs. Nobody in the West will ever see these images because they were censored by editors in Baghdad: only a "soft" version made it to worldwide TV distribution.

According to the Arab cameramen, two trucks full of bodies - mostly children, and women in flowered dresses - were parked outside the Hilla hospital. Dr Nazem el-Adali, trained in Scotland, said almost all the dead and wounded were victims of cluster bombs dropped in the Hilla region and in the neighboring village of Mazarak. Abbas initially said that there were 33 dead and 310 wounded. Then the ICRC went on site with a team of four, and they said that there were "dozens of dead and 450 wounded". Contacted by satphone on Thursday, Huguenin-Benjamin confirmed there were at least 460 wounded, being treated in an ill-equipped 280-bed hospital.

Journalists taken to Hilla from Baghdad on an official tour on Wednesday talked of at least 61 dead. The Independent's Robert Fisk described the mortuary as "a butcher's shop of chopped-up corpses". The ICRC is adamant: all victims are "farmers, women and children". And Dr Hussein Ghazay, also from Hilla hospital, confirmed that "all the injuries were either from cluster bombing or from bomblets that exploded afterwards when people stepped on them or children picked them up by mistake".

Iraqi journalists on site and later an Agence France Presse (AFP) photographer say that they have seen debris equipped with small parachutes characteristic of cluster bombs - which release up to 200 bomblets. Mohamed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi Information Minister, has not volunteered details yet on the Hilla massacre. US Central Command in Qatar only admits it has used "six cluster bombs in the center of Iraq" - and against a tank column: these would be the CBU 105, the so-called "intelligent" cluster bombs which compensate for wind. The Pentagon line remains that there are "no indications" that the US dropped cluster bombs in the Hilla region.

Widely used in Afghanistan, cluster bombs are vehemently denounced by human rights organizations: they compare their deadly effects to anti-personnel mines, which are outlawed by the Ottawa Convention (not signed, incidentally, by either the US or Iraq). Cluster bombs are far from being smart. Most of its bomblets hit the ground without exploding. The small yellow cylinders remain deadly weapons threatening civilians - especially children. Human Rights Watch, in vain, has tried to persuade the Pentagon not to use cluster bombs, stressing that "Iraqi civilians will pay the price with their lives". This is not the first incident of mass civilian deaths. The Independent newspaper of London claims that it has conclusively proved that an American missile was responsible for the devastation at the Shu'ale market in Baghdad last Friday, with at least 62 civilians confirmed dead. The missile - either a high speed anti-radiation missile (Harm) or a Paveway laser-guided bomb - is manufactured by Raytheon in Texas. Raytheon is the world's largest manufacturer of so-called "smart" weapons - including Patriots and Tomahawks.

A piece of fuselage shown by a Shu'ale resident to the Independent's Robert Fisk reads the number 30003-704ASB7492, followed by a second code, MFR 96214 09. An investigation by the Independent determined that "the reference MFR 96214 was the identification or 'cage' number of a Raytheon plant in the city of McKinney, Texas. The 30003 reference refers to the Naval Air Systems Command, the procurement agency responsible for furnishing the US Navy's air force with its weaponry." Many defense analysts have agreed that what happened at the Shu'ale market was almost certainly due to a Harm - which carries a warhead designed to explode into thousands of aluminum fragments. The Bush administration, Downing Street and the US Central Command continue to blame the civilian massacre in Baghdad on misfired Iraqi missiles.

Al-Mustansariya University in Baghdad - the oldest in the world - has been bombed. A Red Crescent maternity hospital has been bombed. In al-Janabiy, in the southeast of Baghdad, Patrick Baz, a veteran AFP photographer who stared horror in the face in Beirut in the 1980s, stumbled into a farm pulverized by missiles with at least 20 dead inside, including 11 children.

Iraq may not be totally united behind the renewed call of the Saddam Hussein regime, which is a complex mix of Arab nationalism and jihad invoked to rally every citizen to a war of liberation. But the terrible images of the civilian massacre in Shu'ale and the civilian massacre in Hilla, coupled with the Pentagon's denials, have turned the Iraqi nationalist struggle into a volcano. Iraqi exiles in Jordan confirm that people who wouldn't dream of picking up a Kalashnikov to defend Saddam are now committed to defend their families, their houses, their cities and their homeland. Anglo-American soldiers may barely disguise their perplexity, but the fact on the ground is they are now fighting the very people they were supposed to "liberate".

Most, if not all, images of death from above raining over Iraqi civilians are being shown non-stop on al-Jazeera, Abu-Dhabi TV, al-Arabiya or the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. The anger over the Arab world must surely be growing. Even "moderate" regimes are being touched. The semi-official al-Ahram, Egypt's premier newspaper, sums it up in an editorial, "The 'clean war' has become the dirtiest of wars, the bloodiest, the most destructive.

Smart weapons have become deliberately stupid, blindly killing people in markets and popular neighborhoods." Jordan's King Abdullah was forced to publicly denounce what he termed the "invasion of Iraq" and vigorously register his "pain and sorrow" with the "murder of women and children ... as we see on our television screens the growing number of martyrs among innocent Iraqi civilians. As a father, I feel the pain of every Iraqi family, of every child, and every father."